Posts Tagged ‘television’

Here are our assessments on this year’s nominees for the 83rd Academy Award category of Best Director of a feature film.

Darren Aronofsky

Black Swan

Though Aronofsky has only directed a handful of films his distinct visual style and his gift of pulling great performances out of his actors are what make his films, and especially Black Swan, so remarkable.  Aronofsky makes Black Swan a terrifying nightmare by mixing genres like horror, psychological thrillers and women’s pictures to tell the story of Nina Sayer’s rapid descent into madness.  The constantly moving handheld camera and shooting the film as if from Nina’s perspective  allow the audience to identify with the ballerina so severely that watching the line between her imagination and reality fracture becomes all the more terrifying.  But while Aronofsky’s visual style can be stunning, it can also be distracting.  Audiences, and by extension Oscar voters, can either find Aronofsky’s style engrossing or a little ostentatious and silly.  Aronofsky’s direction, as well as the film itself, is fairly divisive, and he will have a tough time beating either David Fincher or Tom Hooper.

Odds of Winning: Unlikely

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It’s a question that’s plagued me for a while now: whatever happened to big Hollywood movie musicals?  Movie genres typically go through cycles of popularity and I think we’re due for another round of flashy, dance-filled musicals.

Busby Berkley's kaleidoscopic dance numbers, like this one in "Footlight Parade" (1933), helped make American musicals world famous

Musicals have been a long-enduring genre since the early days of film.  In fact, the very first sound film was a musical—1927’s The Jazz Singer.  When it became a runaway success, studios rushed to create more musicals, some of which became the beginnings of a series.  Warner Brothers’ triumph with The Gold Diggers of Broadway led to The Gold Diggers of 1933, which became one of the most celebrated musicals of all time thanks in large part to Busby Berkeley’s intricate choreography.  RKO Radio Pictures first paired dancers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers—who danced together in nine films—in 1933 in Flying Down to Rio, creating arguably the most famous dancing couple in film history.  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released The Broadway Melody in 1929, which not only started a series but also won the Academy Award for Best Picture.  As time went on, production companies made more and more musicals until the genre reached its greatest popularity in the 1940’s and ‘50s.

Though many studios made musicals during that time, MGM arguably became the company most associated with producing expensive, opulent and immensely successful musicals.  They produced Easter Parade, Summer Stock, An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Guys and Dolls, as well as numerous others.  Those films were a mixture of song and dance and while they weren’t exactly realistic, they were always entertaining. MGM musicals have always been my favorites and when I think of the kind of musicals I’d love to see now, I imagine huge productions with the same glamour and spectacle as MGM’s greatest musicals.  I’m talking musicals with big, expensive set pieces and extended dance sequences with dancers wearing costumes of every conceivable color.  I’m talking great songs that not only convey exactly what the character feels, but are also catchy and make the audience want to sing along.

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